Rock & Roll Will Stand
(Edited by Greil Marcus)
"The scene is Berkeley---San Francisco---and then the world. The subject is rock and roll---politics---the way things are now, the way they were. Some of the seven contributors to this collection have written for the San Francisco Express-Times, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and various underground publications. One of them hosts a weekly oldies show on San Francisco's KSAN-FM. One of them was a street singer in Paris before he got married. Some of them go to graduate school in Berkeley. Their names are: Marvin Garson, Greil Marcus, Mike "Flash" Daly, Langdon Winner, Stewart Kessler, Steve Strauss and Sandy Darlington..."
From the original back cover of Rock & Roll Will Stand.
Double Feature
(By Michael Goodwin
& Greil Marcus)
Mystery Train
(Written by Greil Marcus)
"Gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of Rock 'n' Roll."
-Bruce Springsteen
"Mystery Train is a reservoir of incredible information on the shaping and influences of rock 'n' roll, brilliantly set against a backdrop of American folkways by rock music's best writer." -Robbie Robertson
"Should be read by anyone who cares about America or its music."-The New York Times.
Psychotic Reactions
& Carburetor Dung
(Edited by Greil Marcus)
Bangs wrote about specific records and performances, about the performers themselves and the audiences, about the promise in the music and what if finally delivered. but his writing moves beyond specifics, opening out to grasp and digest and illuminate an entire cultrue and way of life, and to speak to what gives the music at the heart of that culture the power to move people and to possess them.
The legacy of a strikingly original critic, PsychoticReactions and Carburetor Dung is, as well, a remarkable document of its time.
Stranded
(Edited by Greil Marcus)
When rock critic Greil Marcus asked 20 other writers on rock what one rock-and-roll album they'd want to take to a desert island, the resulting 20 fervent essays by the likes of Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau became this engaging book. It's a brief but intense amusement to imagine spending the rest of your life under a coconut palm listening to The Kinks, The Eagles, Van Morrison or The Ronettes.
"[This] collection of essays [is] by turns thoughtful, compelling, sexy, hilarious, quirky--and surprisingly true to the basic impulse of rock-and-roll."
-The New York Times Book Review, Laurence Gonzales
Lipstick Traces
(Written by Greil Marcus)
Lipstick Traces CD
"Lipstick Traces/ On A Cigarette"---so sang Benny Spellman in 1962. This is a book about movements in culture that barely left a trace, at least in conventional terms of power, rulership, recognized events, and certifeid masterpieces. And yet, in terms of how poeple actually live, in the way they walk and talk, the traces linger in minds and voices across the world. They form secret history of modern times, told
by way of what official history vainly tries to exclude: the possibility of its own negation.
Greil Marcus...began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotton---where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.
Mid-Life Confidential
(Contribution from Greil Marcus)
"This band plays music as well as Metallica writes novels."-Dave Barry
"I never intended to become known for cross-dressing."
-Dave Marsh, in white taffeta.
Dead Elvis
(Written by Greil
Marcus)
From Publishers Weekly:
In this consistently amazing analysis, Marcus proposes that rock king Elvis Presley (1935-1977) has been more important dead than alive and in the process makes readers care about far more cultural trivia than they might have thought possible. A philosopher and critic with a novelist's passion and creativity (his Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century was dauntingly dense but compelling), Marcus writes with flash and style. Scanning the American scene, he finds Elvis omnipresent, from the cult TV show Twin Peaks (he killed Laura Palmer) to the star's life, which to many embodied the American dream. While the premise may seem far-fetched, Marcus's assessment of the American psyche and the 60 disturbing illustrations, including the cover of the album Disgraceland by the rock group Elvis Hitler, bear him out. Perhaps "nothing but a hound dog" in life, in memory Elvis proves very much more.
In The Fascist Bath Room
(Written by Greil Marcus)
From Publishers Weekly"
Rock 'n' roll critic Marcus follows the punk rock scene as well as more mainstream music in this assemblage of reviews and articles published in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Artforum and elsewhere. For Marcus ( Lipstick Traces ), punk was a salubrious cultural explosion, bent on a cleansing negation like the Dada movement. He likens the Sex Pistols to novelist Margaret Drabble: both grapple with the plight of people attempting to live without a belief in the future. Although his focus is on punk groups like the Clash, the Mekons, Gang of Four and the Au Pairs, Marcus ranges far afield to discuss Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, the Go-Gos and the Rolling Stones. Fans of his previous books will enjoy having these pieces in one volume.
The Dustbin of History
(Written by Greil Marcus)
"This book could just as easily be called The Theft of History. Even being a witness to events is no longer a guarantee of their permanence. In the course of my recent interrogations, I found that Greil Marcus's words were quoted to me as often as those of the subjects of his essays. but once you have enough words in circulation, somebody will come along to use them to trip you up."-Elvis Costello
The Old, Weird America
(
Written by Greil Marcus)
“This book is terminal. Goes deeply
into the subconscious and plows through
that period of time like a rake.
Greil Marcus has done it again.”-Bob Dylan
"Brilliant---Imaginative and erudite."-Hanif Jureishi
Double Trouble Written By Greil Marcus
"From a critic who knows music and culture like no other, a fascinating look at two outsiders who epitomize America's fractured self-image...In Double Trouble Greil Marcus draws on articles he published from 1992 to 2000 to explore the kinship between Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley..."
-From the inside cover of Double Trouble.
The Manchurian Candidate
Written by Greil Marcus
There are unforgettable performances in The Manchurian Candidate from Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury as an incarnation of murderous perversity. But Frank Sinatra is at the heart of the film, horrified, then devastated, by what he has to see until, finally, for Greil Marcus, he is "a man almost dead with sorrow and guilt." As Marcus reconstructs the drama, this is a movie in which the director and actors were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. He shows how The Manchurian Candidate has burrowed deeply into American culture, becoming at once an ineradicable piece of folklore and a mystery yet to be solved.
Jay Defeo and the Rose
Edited by Jane Green, Leah Levy & Jay Defeo
Rarely has an artist been so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her monumental painting The Rose. Begun in the late 1950s, when DeFeo, a central figure of the Beat generation of San Francisco, was just starting to garner widespread national recognition, the visionary work occupied the artist for eight years. Massive in scale, layered with some two thousand pounds of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which will exhibit it along with other works by DeFeo in the fall of 2003.
This volume is the first major study of The Rose in particular, and of Jay DeFeo in general. In the collection, eleven distinguished art and cultural historians and writers--Bill Berkson, Niccolo Caldararo, Richard Candida Smith, Walter Hopps, Lucy Lippard, Greil Marcus, Sandra Phillips, Marla Prather, Carter Ratcliff, David A. Ross, and Martha Sherrill--unfold the story of the creation, and of the tricky and painstaking rescue, of DeFeo's radiant masterpiece. While providing new material on The Rose and exposing many myths surrounding both the artist and her great work, these essays also place Jay DeFeo in relation to artists of her time, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, and Eva Hesse. The book, which adds significantly to the scholarship of postwar American art, includes seventy-three halftones, thirteen color plates, and a detailed chronology, by Judith Dunham, of DeFeo's life and work.